Jodie Foster tearing up a dirt road, yelling stellar coordinates into a walkie-talkie à la the 1997 sci-fi film Contact. Control rooms alive with a cacophony of "enhance that signal". Real-time discovery. That's what I pictured when my PhD supervisor told me I'd be going observing at a telescope.
Author
- Alix Violet Freckelton
Research Fellow - Sun, Stars, and Exoplanets, University of Birmingham
Cut to 2am on top of a mountain in La Palma last April, at an altitude that makes you forget you're in the Canary Islands. It was utterly freezing, and I had dressed for the sunny archipelago in thin layers. I almost dropped my mug trying to close the telescope door against the wind.
Coffee and food waited two minutes away in the service building. In the darkness, the wind caught a loose scrap of fabric and scared the life out of me. I fell over within 30 seconds. Winds of 40km/h aren't uncommon at the observatory; I was just entirely unprepared.
I sat on the road, mourning my dignity. And I looked up. For the first time in my life, I saw the Milky Way. It painted the sky, reminding me violently of my insignificance. Nothing in my life has ever compared to that. I allowed myself to bask in it for ten minutes. Then the work beckoned me: I needed coffee, and hadn't told my colleague which star was next on the schedule.
How is an observing night prepared?
A night at a telescope begins in the afternoon. At around 4pm, my colleague, who was training me to use the telescope, and I drove up to the Nordic Optical Telescope . It's a gorgeous piece of kit, with a diameter of 2.56 metres. It collects enough starlight for exquisitely precise measurements.
Every instrument and filter had to be carefully tested. On my side, this was a few lines of code. The telescope operator ensured everything worked properly and set up the telescope. While calibrations ran, I started scheduling the night's observations.
Telescope time is limited, so having three nights at the helm meant I had to squeeze out every second I could. Hollywood did not prepare me for how many spreadsheets this involves. This sort of scheduling requires careful balancing of many factors. For example, observing stars close together on the night sky consecutively to avoid spending too much time repointing the telescope.
Once calibration and scheduling were complete, I watched the sun set. It was beautiful, but also a warning - working hours will soon begin. If you catch the right moment, you can see a small fleet of astronomers in cars headed to their respective telescopes.
The mountain came to life with domes opening, catching the first starlight of the night. There's more than 20 telescopes in the observatory on the mountain, whose specialisms range from observing supernovae to exoplanets (any planet beyond our solar system).
The night itself
Around 8pm, the first light from a star - HD153557 in this case , a dwarf star around 59 light-years away - entered the telescope. This is always a bit special. The whir of the dome moving, the shutters opening, seeing the monitors show the first traces of data. I sipped my coffee, turned up the 80s hits, and was content in the knowledge that I'd still be in that chair in 12 hours.
This night started rather predictably. The weather was perfect, not a cloud in sight, and the telescope behaved beautifully. Before long we had a spreadsheet slowly getting filled in with completed observations. I knew the peace wouldn't last. I'd done ten observing nights at two different telescopes by that point in my career, and not one of them without something disrupting my colour-coded plans. Typically, a cloud will move right in front of a star I'm trying to observe, or it'll rain and that means we have to close the dome. But every few nights, there's something a little more exciting.
An email just before midnight brought with it a Target of Opportunity alert . These are observations that need to be done immediately, a blink-and-you'll-miss-it moment. This one was a gamma-ray burst . It's one of the most violent events in the universe, over a trillion times brighter than our Sun. This was picked up by a space-based detector and emailed to us to request the observation.
Gamma-ray bursts aren't in my area of expertise - I research stars like the Sun and their surrounding planets. Far less explosive. Between switching observing instruments, rotating the dome, checking calibrations, I was also digesting as much information as I could about what a gamma-ray burst is. This was probably the closest I'll ever get to my Jodie Foster moment, and it was a rather anticlimactic, blurry image loading very slowly on a screen.
After the gamma-ray burst was observed, the control room became quiet again. Back to my spreadsheets and falling over trying to get coffee. To feeling slightly lonely but seeing another dome rotating under the moonlight when I stepped outside, and being reminded of the other tired astronomers all working beneath the same stars.
It was 8:30am when I finally got back to my room. Ready for a shower, and bed, and to wake up in five hours and do it all again.
The scientific end product
The reality is that scientific interpretation rarely happens in real time. The telescope measurements are first cleaned and calibrated by a computer programme, which turns them into usable spectra. I then apply my own analysis code to these spectra. For me, this comes much later, at my desk in Birmingham once my sleep schedule has recovered. These particular observations gave us stellar spectra : when a star's light splits into a rainbow, imposed with patterns that reveal its temperature and chemical composition.
The most common observing nights involve balancing spreadsheets, a whole lot of coffee, and slowly surrendering to the delirium of sleep deprivation. Some of them have dramatic alerts. Some of them end up entirely clouded out and allow for an early bedtime.
There is no pivotal "enhance that signal" moment, but there is the quiet, consistent sense of joy that I'm cataloguing and understanding the stars that could one day be found to host another Earth. Hollywood didn't prepare me for the scientific process. But it got the wonder spot on.
Alix Violet Freckelton receives funding from UKRI.
